Conclusion

Abstract

The readings I have undertaken suggest the bare framework of a narrative in which the treatment of national identity moves from the romantique to the romanesque. Violent, binary dreams of nation, of the sort which animate texts like The Scottish Chiefs, fail to acknowledge the influence of a mediator. Such dreams are modified, in The Wild Irish Girl, by a half-conscious attempt to incorporate mimetic desire into a new kind of national structure, dimly glimpsed through metaphors of sexual love and the domestic integration of differences. This attempt, or paradigm, falls into the hands of Walter Scott, where it undergoes a series of searching variations and developments, in which a profound awareness of the nature of imitative desire is articulated through a range of fictional forms and tropes, if not in political analyses or proposals of a corresponding depth. In America, Fenimore Cooper reacts to Scott’s work in several ways, sometimes critiquing and sometimes re-romanticizing in tragic mode the developed paradigm, seeming to hint that no such reconciliation is possible, that the triangular condition is one not of stable reconciliation, but of perpetual outlawry.